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We’re wrapping up March with our part two of Whatcha Reading! Sneezy: I’ve recently started Between Harlem and Heaven by JJ Johnson and Alexander Smalls. ( A | BN | K ) The writing is lovely and I can’t wait to read all about the food!!!! Elyse: I’m just over halfway through The Priory of the Orange Tree ( A | BN | K | G | AB ) and I’m loving it. It’s epic fantasy, very immersive, and so far there hasn’t been a ton of violence like in other books I’ve read (looking at GRRM). I’m listening to For Her Consideration ( A | BN | K ) but I’m just a little bit in. So far I’m enjoying it Lara: I’ve just started my first ever audiobook and it’s a revelation. I’ve opted for A Study in Scarlet Women by Sherry Thomas and I’m loving it. A | BN | K | ABTara: Audiobooks are the only way I can finish nonfiction! Speaking of which, I’ve started listening to Bittersweet by Susan Cain. I saw her speak about it last year and am glad my library hold came through. Sarah: I just started Artfully Yours by Johanna Lowell. ( A | BN | K ) So far I’ve met the heroine, Nina, who is a boss-level art forger, and is working as a housemaid, and I’ve met the hero, who is an art critic who can spot forgeries, and who has a terrible relationship with his brother. I have barely gotten past the first chapter but I’m very curious and want to have more reading time now, please. Claudia: I can’t believe I missed a new book by her! I really liked the Runaway Duchess (The Duke Undone less so but still enjoyed it). Carrie: I am reading The Light We Carry by Michelle Obama. ( A | BN | K | AB ) I don’t use audiobooks because they make me fall asleep but I wish I had this on audiobook because I think her conversational style would work better for me in that format. That being said I’m enjoying it! Claudia: I’m in the middle of blah season unfortunately!! I miss good-book tingles. A | BN | KShana: I just started The Portrait of a Duchess by Scarlett Peckham. Has anyone else read it? Claudia: I have!! EllenM: I preordered it but I haven’t started it yet! Shana: I can’t wait to discuss with you Ellen! Sarah: Shana, what do you think so far? Shana: I’m devouring it, but I’m not sure I love the characters yet. We’ll see! I’m not sure what I think of the big age difference between them. Susan: I’ve just started Thousand Autumns by Meng Xi Shi, ( A | BN ) and like twelve pages in the protagonist is channelling “I can make him worse” energy Shana: I also just finished How to Keep House While Drowning by KC Davis. ( A | BN | K ) I can’t remember if one of you recommended it, but I loved how it encourages self-compassion and life hacks instead of shaming yourself into organizing your home. So, whatcha reading? Let us know in the comments! View the full article

The transcript for Podcast 555. Fashion and the State of Blogging with The Fug Girls has been posted! This podcast transcript was handcrafted with meticulous skill by Garlic Knitter. Many thanks. ❤ Click here to subscribe to The Podcast → View the full article

The New York Write to Pitch event was intense and for good reason. I met industry professionals who were serious about their job and fellow writers who were just as passionate as I am to see our stories succeed. Some of the industry feedback was a tough pill to swallow as a young/new writer, but by the end of the event, I felt at home with the other writers in my group (and some in Paula's!) and especially with Michael, our workshop leader who was dedicated to making our writing future as bright as possible. I have no doubt that for every writer here, NYWP was our first step to a writing career/publishing deal.

It’s Fantasy Suites night on The Bachelor. Cheers to my friend Jen who is here and said, “Wait, there are 27 fucking seasons of this show?!” Indeed. Lady Pudding is currently not talking to me as she has to briefly wear the cone of shame (she’s fine, it’s so she doesn’t lick a topical med off her fur). Sleep with one eye open, mother. We’re in Thailand, BTW. Not Pudding and me, the people on this show. Jesse reminds us that on The Bachelorette it was the Fantasy Suite night that made Zach decide to quit the show. He had a really weird reaction and felt like Rachel was being fake and felt like something was off. My guess? There was potentially an ounce of conflict and he bailed, as is his MO. Then Zach drops the bombshell that there’s not going to be “any sex of any kind” during the Fantasy Suite dates. Jen just looked over at me and rolled her eyes. Jen: “He’s just very… he’s very white bread, milk is spicy… It just…” Yup. “I gotta ask you man, this is just us talking,” Jesse asks IN FRONT OF THE CAMERA AND CREW, “Are you gonna be able to pull this off? It’s gonna be hard.” Zach says he doesn’t imagine that’s how a healthy engagement should start. With sex? Okay. THEN HE TAKES ANOTHER FUCKING SHOWER. Click for Zach Then Ariel, who has the first date, says that being physical with someone is an important part of a relationship for her and she’s looking forward to the overnight date. Well, that should go great. Pudding: He’s going to totally have sex with one of them and cry about it later. Probably in the shower. Click for Zach...probably So he and Ariel go to a night market and do that enraging thing where they eat “gross” food from another culture, in this case cooked insects. They order “the grossest one.” This is so disrespectful. Zach keeps telling the camera how hot his chemistry is with Ariel. At one point they kiss and this woman who gloriously does not give a fuck, just walks into the shot to get a video of a fire eater. During dinner Ariel tells Zach she’s falling in love with him and his eyes get huge but in a not great way. Then he tells Ariel “sex is off the table” with regard to the Fantasy Suite. He says there’s only going to be one person at the end of this, and sex should be with them only. She tells the camera she’s disappointed. The next day he goes on his date with Gabi. She meets Zach on the beach and they have a discussion as to whether or not they’re sweaty. They go to a private island where they drink champagne on the beach. Gabi tells him she feels like she got into her head after spending ten days apart from Zach. Pudding: That sounds like a lovely reprieve. Zach tells her not to feel that way and it gets tense. Eventually she walks away and starts crying and says she feels “stupid and foolish and ugly. I don’t feel like I can even go back there.” I…okay. That ramped up quickly. She says her last boyfriend cheated on her, and she felt again like she’s coming second. “I’m so overtired,” she says tearfully. Okay, things are making more sense now. I get really emotional when I’m exhausted, too. During dinner, Gabi tells him she’s falling in love with him. Zach lets her know about the no sex thing. She looks skeptical or maybe rejected. Gabi says she doesn’t see herself being engaged to someone she’s never had sex with, but that they’ll “work on it.” “It’ll be great,” she sighs. “I can’t wait for him to see my skincare routine.” Cut to the next morning and the two of them are cuddling in bed. Back his hotel, Zach says the whole night was passionate and special, but that something unexpected happened and now he feels like he has a secret. Pudding: CALLED IT. So then Jesse comes over for bro time and Zach tells him that he had sex with Gabi. It is so awkward. It feels like he’s confessing to a parental figure, and they’re the same age. “Do you want to tell the other women what happened?” Jesse asks. Zach says they need to know. Then he says, “This was an act of love, not lust.” The next shot is Kaity getting ready for her date and Zach walking up a pathway. But surprise! When he knocks on the hotel door, it’s Gabi! He tells her that he wants to tell the other women they were intimate because he doesn’t want to have secrets. He literally cannot say the word “sex.” Gabi says she didn’t think it bothered him that much and is clearly caught off guard. She tells the camera that she feels like it was between them and now it’s between them and everyone else. Jen: Ma’am, you are on a televised show. Then Zach tells her he’s falling in love with her. So then it is time for Kaity’s date. They go kayaking in a clear boat. So after they randomly make out in a rain shower, Zach super awkwardly tells Kaity about how he made the no sex rule and broke it. Kaity says that she knew there would be the potential for him to be sleeping with the other women, but she could have gone without him telling her about it. “I’m not happy so I’m not going to pretend I’m happy,” she says. “It’s weird.” He says he’s sorry and she says, “Well you’re not sorry you did it.” She asks the camera how he expected her to feel. She says, “I wasn’t going to give him a high five like, way to go, pal.” He tries to hug her and she says, “It’s real weird, Zach.” He says he doesn’t want them to get engaged and her to be blindsided. Then she tells him that she already knew the gist of the week and she doesn’t care to hear about whether or not he slept with someone else. Kaity tells a PA she doesn’t think she can go into tonight when she’s so unhappy and that she just wants to go home. Kaity eventually does show up to dinner, although she doesn’t look thrilled. She says that the day was a step back, but she feels confident they can get through it. Click for me Eventually they go to the Fantasy Suite. The next day is the Dreaded Rose Ceremony. Gabi says she doesn’t know if she wants a rose because she feels like Zach broke her trust by sharing that he slept with her. In the end Gabi does accept a rose and so does Kaity. As Zach is walking Ariel out, Kaity says to Gabi, “I know you were the only one.” “I feel like I’m wearing a scarlet A on my chest,” says Gabi. “Oh my God, no. Don’t do that,” Kaity says. Zach comes back and they all do an uncomfortable champagne toast. Are you watching? View the full article

My Fair Concubine My Fair Concubine by Jeannie Lin is $1.99! This is a historical “My Fair Lady” style romance – set in the Tang Dynasty in China. Readers loved the retelling and the depth of characterization. However, some readers mentioned that the story dragged at time due to the lack of external conflict. THE NOBLEMAN WHO TURNED A TEA GIRL INTO A PRINCESS… Yan Ling tries hard to be servile-it’s what’s expected of a girl of her class. Being intelligent and strong-minded, she finds it a constant battle. Proud Fei Long is unimpressed by her spirit-until he realizes she’s the answer to his problems. He has to deliver the emperor a “princess.” In two months can he train a tea girl to pass as a noblewoman? Yet it’s hard to teach good etiquette when all Fei Long wants to do is break it, by taking this tea girl for his own… Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. My Sweet Folly My Sweet Folly by Laura Kinsale is $1.99! This book sounds absolutely bananas. Readers really loved the heroine and how witty she was. However, given the bananas quality of the book, some said the pacing is a bit all over the place. Have you read this one? An innocent long-distance correspondence leads to complications in this Regency romance by the New York Times–bestselling author of For My Lady’s Heart. Married to an elderly man, Folie Hamilton finds her lonely days brightened by light-hearted letters from her husband’s cousin, Lt. Robert Cambourne, stationed in Calcutta for the British East India Company. Robert calls her his princess, and she dubs him her knight errant. Unbidden love blossoms, yet upon the death of her husband, Robert’s last letter shatters her heart with three words: I am married. Four years later, Robert summons Folie and her stepdaughter to his estate in England. The girl is his ward, so they must go. The man who greets them, however, is nothing like the charming lieutenant of his letters. This Robert is demented. Screaming at ghosts in demonic rage, he is paranoid and frightening. Yet her body longs to caress his perfect features, to hold his tall, angular body, to find the man who once captured her heart . . . Someone is poisoning him, spinning his brain into madness, of that Robert is sure, but who—and why? Haunted by his dead wife, the one thing his tortured mind understands is that he must keep Folie safe. Folie, with her beautiful expressive eyes, the only warmth in his nightmare world . . . Nominated for a RITA award, My Sweet Folly is another unforgettable love story filled with passion and suspense from the author of Flowers From the Storm, whose work has been praised by Julia Quinn as “unfailingly brilliant and beautiful.” Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. The Fire in the Glass The Fire in the Glass by Jacquelyn Benson is 99c! Previously, we featured Benson’s more action/adventure title and people in the comments also mentioned how much they loved this one. It’s more of a paranormal historical or historical fantasy with a medium main character. London, 1914. Someone is draining the blood of the city’s mediums. Lily Albright knows who’s next. The unacknowledged bastard daughter of the Earl of Torrington, Lily is haunted by visions of the future that she can never change. When she foresees the death of her dearest friend, she realizes the circumstances of that yet-to-be murder match those of a series of brutal and mysterious crimes. If she can find the killer before he strikes, maybe this time she can finally thwart fate and save someone she loves. As Lily’s investigation takes her to a bedchamber where one of society’s most desirable widows lies dead, she realizes she can’t do this alone. She needs help from the reclusive Lord Strangford, a man haunted by his own unusual powers. To pursue the path of a killer, Lily must ask Strangford to face unimaginable horrors – and is compelled to reveal her darkest secrets to a man she has little reason to trust. Somewhere in the city lies a murderer hell-bent on an unspeakable harvest, one that could reshape the future of the human race. To stop him, Lily must face a past rife with betrayal—and embrace the power she has spent her entire life trying to escape. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. Good Girl Good Girl by Jana Aston is FREE! Can I just say that I hate first POV book descriptions, because they rarely tell me enough about the book? What I can gather from this one is this is a workplace, forbidden romance. I’ve always been a good girl. I work hard, I follow the rules, I always achieve my goals. But sometimes good girls want things that aren’t good for them. Or someone who isn’t good for them. Like their new boss. And sometimes they do very bad things to get his attention. Like sell their virginity in an auction. Who knew he’d be so very, very mad? Maybe this was not my best laid plan… Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. View the full article

Kusudama cherry blossom. Courtesy of praaeew, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. As I get older, and the world gets worse, or gets differently bad, or stays the same but my understanding of its badness deepens and broadens, I grow ever more dependent upon books like Akwugo Emejulu’s Fugitive Feminism. This short, sharp text reminds readers that, like the rattling door in a haunted house or the concerned face of a friend who understands well the way a lover is slowly bringing about your annihilation, it is good to leave that which does not serve you. Fleeing, as in the case of the enslaved from the plantation, is no act of cowardice but a tremendous gesture toward liberation. The flight Emejulu encourages is not from a place but from a conceptual space. Referencing the work of Black critical theorists like Sylvia Wynter, Fugitive Feminism troubles the notion of the “human,” arguing that it is not a neutral, objective term for one type of mammal but a philosophical and political category informed by colonialism that, from its invention, excluded Blackness and Black people. For years, many have fought (to no avail) to be, for once, called and acted upon as humans, but for Emejulu, there is nothing to be reclaimed in that cursed white supremacist taxonomy. When we stop seeking inclusion into a category built on genocide and eugenics, there is freedom to explore other ways of being, seeing, and doing. Emejulu’s writing is clear, evocative, and concise, and while readers with no background in the subject material may find places where they need to spend more time, Fugitive Feminism is an extraordinarily accessible text that will touch many of those left behind by society without sacrificing complexity and critical rigor. —Rivers Solomon, author of “This Is Everything There Will Ever Be” A few Januaries ago, I spent a week in Sheringham, a coastal town in Norfolk, England. The friend who’d invited me said that in the summer, the town swells by thousands as pleasure-seekers descend. In the winter, it is cold, rainy, pleasantly desolate. Perfect for writing, which is what we were there for. I’d decided to use the time to write a short story, something I hadn’t done since childhood. When I don’t know how to do something, I research, so I’d been reading many short stories, new and not so new, by Emma Cline, Shirley Hazzard, Gina Berriault, Deborah Eisenberg, Lucia Berlin, Grace Paley, Tillie Olsen, and Yiyun Li. For that week, I brought with me Sylvia Townsend Warner’s selected stories. On the train from London, I read “Oxenhope,” first published in 1966. I’d read it before and liked it. This time it settled on me like an atmosphere. As did Sheringham, when I arrived, with its crash of waves against the seawall on nighttime walks, its empty arcades, and its signs advertising candy floss. Before we arrived, a cliff had crumbled into the sea, taking with it a holiday cottage. (We had to imagine the collapse; we could see only land’s unspectacular absence.) In “Oxenhope,” a sixty-four-year-old man named William returns to the rural Scottish village where he spent a transformative month at seventeen, when, overstudied and exhausted, he’d suffered what he calls a “brain-mauling.” He’d been on a disastrous walking tour when a family of farmers saved him from a storm and insisted he stay. The dailiness of Oxenhope restored him. After departing, he’d undertaken the life he was supposed to have: university, good career, marriage, et cetera. Decades later, though, he feels “like a castaway on the remainder of what life was left to him.” So he returns to Oxenhope. Townsend Warner captures the intricacies of coming back to a place that once changed you, carrying with you all the changes that have happened since. Such a return forces the resisted, unavoidable concession “that the past was draining away out of the present, that Oxenhope, lovely as ever, was irrecoverable … He had grasped at the substance, and the lovely shadow was lost.” As he leaves Oxenhope for the second time, the past unexpectedly comes charging into the present: a young boy shares a bit of local lore, not knowing that the tale features the teenage William. Being a story, having “tenancy in legend,” consoles him. Narrative redeems the fact that the past is uninhabitable. The story I wrote that week in Sheringham—which appears in the Review‘s Spring issue—does not resemble “Oxenhope,” except, perhaps, in its attention to what is said and what it’s possible to say, and to the force that narrative exerts on the future, not just on the past. —Elisa Gonzalez, author of “Sanctuary” Recently I watched Klostės (Folds/Pleats), a black-and-white stop-motion art film directed by the Irish artist Aideen Barry and based on the stories and myths of Kaunas, Lithuania. The film brings together hundreds of local writers, dancers, musicians, and artists in an ambitious collaboration that explores the histories of the city and its interwar architecture. Barry, influenced by her early exposure to Russian, Czech, and Lithuanian stop-motion film on eighties Irish television, revels in the surreal. From the opening shot, a kaleidoscope of abstract, origamiesque pleats of black paper, the film masterfully folds stories upon stories into a dizzying, nonverbal world where colorful characters and the architecture of the city collide. A woman walks into a restaurant; shortly after she orders from the menu, a cake assembles itself in the shape of a building, right by her table. From there we are swept into the magic of Kaunas. In Klostės, Barry suggests that we can reimagine a postcapitalist world, and the citizen as artist in it. —Elaine Feeney, author of “Same, Same” View the full article

Locked-room mysteries are the type of mystery in which a crime looks impossible. (Not to be confused with a “closed circle” mystery, in which the characters are stranded in an isolated setting.) Why are these mysteries appealing to so many readers? I’ve been a fan of locked-room mysteries for decades, and more recently I’ve become an author in the genre. Here are the three reasons why it’s such an enticing type of mystery. First, you know you’re getting a “fair play” puzzle. Many mysteries include clues that are fairly presented, but readers don’t always know which of the many terrific mystery novels they’re picking up includes a puzzle as part of story. In a locked-room mystery, fair-play clues are necessary. Therefore, when a novel or short story is a locked-room mystery, you can be certain that there’s a mystery puzzle you can solve. Clues will be deviously hidden, certainly. But they’re there. The solution of an impossible crime would be no fun if you weren’t given all the clues, so fairly presented information is a necessary element. It’s even more fun not to guess properly, in my opinion, and instead be delightfully surprised at the end. Second, it’s not just any puzzle, but the ultimate puzzle. Because there’s no logical way for the crime to have been committed—be it jewels that disappeared from a guarded safe or a person fatally stabbed with nobody close enough to have done so—it’s not only a whodunnit, but also a howdunnit. Fans of the genre may argue about whether there are any truly new ideas for how to pull off an impossible crime, but one thing is clear: authors continue to come up with ingenious ways to play with existing ideas and hide the truth in plain sight. Locked-room mystery writers continue to engage and surprise us with new twists to these puzzles. Third, you’re likely to find a ghostly atmosphere as the backdrop. If readers wanted only a puzzle, they could pick up a crossword puzzle or other game. Many locked-room mystery enthusiasts appreciate other types of puzzles, as I do, but what elevates this written form of puzzle is the feeling a story can evoke. It’s so much more than a cerebral puzzle. In most locked-room mysteries, you’ll find a ghostly, Gothic atmosphere that permeates the story. Therefore, you’re not only getting a twisty whodunnit and a baffling howdunnit, but also a good ghost story. Yes, there must be a rational explanation at the end, but along the way, you get swept up in the spooky atmosphere that provides an added layer of depth and mysterious fun. John Dickson Carr, widely accepted as the master of the genre, expertly wove macabre elements into his books and stories, making it appear that only a supernatural hand could have caused the criminal events—until the solution reveals a rational explanation, usually revealed quite dramatically by one of Carr’s larger-than-life sleuths. Where to start with locked-room mysteries? I wrote a locked-room mystery starter guide for CrimeReads in 2019, which included terminology and a starter list of books and stories from both the Golden Age of detective fiction (including John Dickson Carr, Clayton Rawson, Ellery Queen, and Agatha Christie) and current authors (including Paul Halter and Sōji Shimada). I’m so pleased that in the few years since I wrote that feature, locked-room mysteries have become even more popular with both readers and writers. Recently, I was especially impressed by Tom Mead’s debut novel Death and the Conjuror, as well as newly translated Japanese novels by Seishi Yokomizo that are now being made available to an English-language audience. My new locked-room mystery, The Raven Thief, plays with traditional elements of the genre, including hints of the supernatural when a séance leads to murder. I’m enjoying paying homage to the locked-room mysteries from the Golden Age of detective fiction—but putting my own spin on the genre. Atmosphere and characters are just as important as the puzzle to me, so I set the stage with home renovation company Secret Staircase Construction that builds magical elements like sliding bookcases and hidden rooms into peoples’ homes. I make sure the clues to solve the mystery are fairly presented, but I hope readers will get swept up in the story and enjoy a surprise when former stage illusionist sleuth Tempest Raj reveals the solution. One murder. Four impossibilities. A fake séance hides a very real crime. I owe a great debt to the ingenious locked-room mystery writers—past and present and from around the world—who’ve given me countless hours of entertainment and inspired me to contribute to the genre. *** View the full article

Perhaps love is in the air. Or maybe it’s a rush to reclaim control as a new normal gradually emerges from the global pandemic. Whatever the reason, my partner and I have, after a lengthy gap, been invited to not one, but three weddings. And these are not modest gatherings either, but true destination weddings in exotic locales, the kind you see in movies. They will not be rushed potluck affairs held in the backyard of a distant cousin (not that those can’t be lovely too). With a bit of budgetary juggling, we plan to attend them all. It is, after all, a blessing to celebrate with loved ones. It’s also an opportunity to meet new people and explore distant lands. As the first approaches, I’ve found myself pondering the whole endeavor. I think of the planning that goes into such events and the stresses that accompany even joyful occasions. Lately I’ve also been dissecting the ways “big events” fit into some of my favorite stories, and my own writings. I now notice when they appear in shows, noting how such scenes alter the narrative, even when tangential to primary or even secondary plotlines. Events like weddings, holidays, reunions, retirements, and funerals are a part of life and so it is only natural they should appear in our tales. Some may appear in your work in progress right now. If there isn’t one, I am not advocating you plop a random celebration into your story. In a publishing world that demands killing your darlings, I would never suggest adding filler. Then again, entire libraries could be devoted only to stories centered around life’s festivities. Jane Austen novels might well be reduced to a stream of letters and diary entries if not for village balls and the occasional nuptials. These days, Hallmark devotes an entire season to stories of offspring returning home or flung to the wilds for some sugary holiday confection and ultimate enlightenment. People gobble them up like cookies, as do I. But that is not what I’m talking about today. Instead, my premise is simple – it may prove wise to give extra scrutiny to milestone events already present in your narrative, for such occasions provide fertile ground to strengthen your story. Let’s explore a few avenues for kicking your writing up a notch when it comes to the “big event” in your tale. Revealing Character Nothing highlights character more than an unrelenting spotlight. An event in your story can serve that purpose. Perhaps your shy protagonist is corralled into giving a speech at a milestone birthday of an aging parent, the one with which he’s never seen eye to eye. Perhaps your hero is marrying, and all eyes will be on her regardless of how much she prefers the shadows. Scenes like these provide an opportunity to delve into your characters, exploring their motivations and deepest fears. Chance encounters at events can also provide a natural entry point for crucial backstory, evoking past heartbreaks, unrequited loves, or long-simmering rivalries. Use the unique situation to help readers understand idiosyncrasies in your character’s personality, uncovering the roots of their sagging confidence or the source of their unvanquished optimism. Think of the event as a fresh stage set, filled with new and possibly one-off actors. Step back and think of ways to mix things up. For just a few pages you can look at your characters, and have your readers see the characters, in a fresh light. Take advantage of that opportunity. Show them something new, exposing a deeper vein. Developing Relationships In my youth, Judith Guest’s novel Ordinary People was one of my favorite reads. When the movie came out, I was impressed at how closely the screen play echoed the book, incorporating at times entire pages of dialog, word for word. But a key scene added to the movie has stuck with me for years. The scene takes place during a Christmas family visit. Beth Jarrett, the emotionally distant mother of the protagonist, has broken a plate following a cringeworthy argument that erupts during the taking of a family photo. Her mother enters the room, and the two speak. The delicate dance of a conversation, clipped and understated, reveals so much. In just a few lines one gains an invaluable glimpse into how Beth became brittle, so determined to maintain appearances that smoothing the edges – “fixing the break” as she describes it – became more important than offering genuine affection, even as trauma threatens to destroy her family. The resulting scene is a brilliant addition to the already exceptional drama of the source material. Events in stories open a path for insights like this. Even lone heroes have families; and a funeral can bring them into the story, if only briefly. Longtime friendships can be shown from a different angle. If your story is a romance, a family reunion provides innumerable opportunities for the new couple to bond or introduce rough seas for them to navigate. Let your imagination guide your hand. Pantsers are old pros at this type of improvisation, but even strict plotters may find something of value in the scribbled margins. Surprising the Reader The element of surprise, in fact, may be the real benefit from this writerly exercise. In addition to character reveals mentioned previously, what better time to expose a juicy tidbit of information or a jarring plot twist than during a chance encounter at a social event? A lot can happen when you bring characters into the same room, or ballroom, at the same time. Be sure to make use of the opportunity. You can engage readers on other levels of surprise as well. Perhaps the occasion provides a moment of levity, or at least respite, during an otherwise taut thriller. Or maybe you can add a dash of poignancy to an otherwise raucous comedy. Remember, the events are already there in our stories. It is up to us, as writers, to tease them out to their full potential, creating more compelling tales for our readers. Those are my musings, which barely scratch the surface. What are your thoughts? How do you make the most of the milestone events and special occasions in your stories? Do you have examples of reveals or surprises from your own works or a favorite novel? In what other ways can “big events” be employed to elevate a story? I look forward to hearing your thoughts. [url={url}]View the full article[/url]

The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debut novels in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Vibhuti Jain, Our Best Intentions (William Morrow) The characters in Our Best Intentions are immigrants under the powerful sway of the American Dream. Babur Singh—call him Bobby—is a single dad who owns a rideshare business, Move with Bobby, which would also be a good name for a man with a van or a dance class. Bobby dotes on his daughter, Angie, and they live in a wealthy suburb where Angie never feels comfortable. When she stumbles on a body, a classmate named Chiara Thompson, on her way home from swim practice, the news rocks the town and sheds light on the issues of privilege and morality. Jain’s debut is an impressive feat, nuanced and unafraid to tackle some thorny issues. –LL Philip Ellis, Love and Other Scams (Putnam) Nothing brings two people together quite like desperation and a get-rich-quick scheme (I’m really hoping there’s some fan fiction that gets this going with The Sting.) In Philip Ellis’ utterly charming new novel, a down-on-her-luck graphic designer with a passion for pick-pocketing teams up with a handsome bartender with his own skills at purloining valuable objects after they discover a once-in-a-lifetime chance to steal an enormous diamond. –MO Nathan Oates, A Flaw in the Design (Random House) This book has a complex premise which includes many of the issues we are grappling with as a society. Gil, a respected creative writing professor (I’ve heard they exist but don’t think I’ve seen one in the wild), agrees to take in his nephew, Matthew, after Gil’s sister and her husband are killed in a car accident. Gil and his wife aren’t crazy about the idea of suddenly having a 17-year-old boy in their home and are discomfited about taking Matthew in as he behaved strangely (creepy strangely) with their young daughter. With the bitter taste of that incident still lingering, and Matthew writing detailed stories about his parents’ death and the potential death of Gil’s family, Gil must decide if he is going to try and stop his disturbed nephew before something dire happens. –LL Gerardo Sámano Córdova, Monstrilio (Zando) Part of a new wave of haunted house horror that continues to expand and redefine the genre, Monstrilio is about a woman who creates a monster from a piece of her dead son’s lung, feeding it bloody sacrifices as it grows into the image of her long-gone child. Her monstrilio is loved, cared for, and wholly monstrous. But are not the monsters among us also capable (and deserving) of love? Read this if you liked Sarah Gailey’s Just Like Home! -MO Jinwoo Chong, Flux (Melville House) Flux is full of surprises and difficult to describe. Three storylines slowly begin to converge into a tale of time-traveling corporate serial killers. Woven into all three stories is a connection to a 1980s detective show featuring a now-canceled star facing damning abuse allegations. If you like stories featuring neo-noir style, corporate corruption, and anything else that wouldn’t be out of place in a slightly more humorous version of the Blade Runner universe, then check this one out! Also notable as an exploration of queer and Asian-American identities. –MO Ren DeStafano, How I’ll Kill You (Berkeley) (adult fiction debut) DeStefano hits some high marks in How I’ll Kill You, a chronicle of three identical triplets who take turns at a very serious game. The sister at bat makes a man fall in love with her, murders him, and calls the other two sisters to help with the clean-up. So far, Sissy, the youngest, has always been on the cleanup crew. But as they hit Arizona the sisters decide it’s Sissy’s turn. Her mark is a widower named Edison (really? that’s a name now?), and as she works her love magic on him her sisters get restless and pressure her to finish the job so they can move on. But there is a complication: Sissy falls in love with Edison. Will her sisters finish her mission, and also do away with her? Or can she and Edison somehow escape and break the cycle? –LL View the full article

There’s nothing quite like a messed up student-teacher relationship when it comes to stirring up drama. First of all, it’s relatable. Most of us have been a student or a teacher at some point, so we understand the inherent dynamics. Even if we’ve never filled those roles officially, you’d have to be a serious loner not to have interacted with someone either as a mentor or a mentee. Second, it’s loaded. The desire to emulate someone we admire is fraught with tension, and the urge to mentor can be just as complicated. Mix some deep-seated parent/child pathos with the struggle to prove one’s self and…voila! You have an irresistible recipe for drama. Novelists, filmmakers, and playwrights have exploited this trope again and again. It’s a rich vein to tap, after all, rife with taboo and possibility. As a professor myself and the daughter of two teachers, I’ve long been fascinated by the nuances of student/teacher relationships; the more twisted and dysfunctional, the more they fascinate me. I explored just such a relationship in my first suspense novel, Watch Me. Apparently, the dynamic still has its hooks in me, because I’ve tackled it again in my latest novel, The Protégé. If you, like me, find dysfunctional mentors and problematic students captivating, this list is for you. Here are a few of my favorite examples from fiction, film, and theatre. ___________________________________ Fiction ___________________________________ Dare Me by Megan Abbott The inimitable Megan Abbott is one of my favorite authors, and Dare Me is her most addictive novel to date. In a small midwestern town, a high school cheerleading coach brings her own messy life to her role as teacher and mentor. Her students follow her with slavish admiration into a volatile world of shadows and secrets. Only Megan Abbott can make small town cheerleading feel this edgy and sinister. The Truants by Kate Weinberg Set at an obscure university in England, this beautifully written debut novel explores a group of students mesmerized by their charismatic professor. Our protagonist, Jess, has come to East Anglia University specifically to study with Dr. Lorna Clay, a scholar who has written extensively about Agatha Christie. As Jess becomes increasingly close with a tight circle of students in Dr. Clay’s orbit, love triangles, scandals, and raw betrayal provide her with an education more thorough than the one she signed up for. If you love the atmospheric density of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, you’ll find much of the same pleasures here. The Likeness by Tana French I can’t create a list of favorite novels without including at least one by Tana French. The Likeness isn’t a campus novel, per se, unlike the others I’ve mentioned so far. It’s the second book in the Dublin Murder Squad series, though it holds its own as a stand-alone. The protagonist, Cassie Maddox, gets pulled back into her previous job as an undercover cop when her doppelganger is murdered. Her mentor, Frank, is a fascinating undercover detective who taught her everything she knows; later in the series Frank serves as the narrator of Faithful Place. His slippery morals and one-of-a-kind voice make him one of French’s most memorable characters. In spite of a deeply implausible central premise, this novel is complicated, lush, and (as always with French) linguistically delicious. ___________________________________ Film ___________________________________ All About Eve premiered in 1950, with Bette Davis as Margo Channing, an aging Broadway star, and Anne Baxter as Eve, her conniving young protégé. Eve manipulates her way into Margo’s world, first as an adoring fan, then as her personal secretary, before ultimately usurping her on the stage and screen. While the plotline of women pitted against women in a cutthroat industry may feel slightly dated, what may strike you on viewing it is not how much things have changed, but how disturbingly relevant those themes still feel seventy-odd years later. ___________________________________ Theatre ___________________________________ Oleanna by David Mamet This two-character play from the early 90s focuses on the power struggle between John, a male professor, and Carol, one of his female students. When Carol accuses John of sexual harassment, the vagueness about whether said harassment actually took place casts the play in a morally ambiguous light that is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. Mamet’s ear for messy, terse dialogue and complex characters gives the play a propulsive, can’t-look-away intensity. The Sound Inside by Adam Rapp Another two-person play, this time with genders reversed (a female professor and a male student), Adam Rapp’s script is heady and a little bleak, but totally worth the ride. It premiered in 2018, and later received an Audible Original production starring the original Broadway cast members, Marie-Louise Parker and Will Hochman. The Sound Inside tells the story of Bella Baird, a​ ​writer and Ivy League English professor who is dedicated to preserving her solitude and lives almost exclusively inside her own head. When a socially awkward and mysterious student attempts to connect with her, she finds herself letting him into her life under extraordinary circumstances. I’m terrified of spoilers here, so I won’t reveal any more about the plot, but observing these two odd, lonely, brilliant souls inch closer is both riveting and moving. *** View the full article

When I sat down at my desk and began to write the story that became my first published novel, Maisie Dobbs, I didn’t really have a distinct literary form in mind. I wasn’t thinking “mystery” and certainly wasn’t thinking “crime.” I had a story in my head about a young girl who makes a transition from one social class to another, and who has a life-changing experience of war that effectively removes any vestiges of youthful innocence. As she was now thirty-two, I had to give her a job, and within a few lines, I knew she was an investigator of sorts, one who had a deep sense of the human condition and psyche—the “soul.” As writing progressed, other characters entered to help bring her to life, revealing not only her strengths, but the places where she was scathed by experience and where she hurt. By the time I had a manuscript in my hand, I thought I’d wrien a coming of age/war story with a sort of underpinning of mystery, and for the sake of the cover letter I was sending unsolicited to a collection of agents gleaned from a directory, I described Maisie Dobbs as “cross genre.” And that doesn’t help most agents, publishers, publicists, or booksellers at all. NPR’s Maureen Corrigan described the novel as a “curious confection”—but lucky me, getting a review on Fresh Air! Later, in bookstores, I saw Maisie Dobbs shelved in several sections, including in one instance, “Anti War.” I loved it! However, the fact is that readers expecting a series of whodunits had come to the wrong place, because I am a proponent of the notion that a mystery does not have to include a crime—indeed, I’ve always viewed it as the archetypal journey through chaos to resolution. But that doesn’t help the PR pros to pitch a novel or indeed booksellers and librarians to shelve it—and it plays havoc with reviewers. Does this go to the Crime critic? The Historical Novel expert? Or the … well, fill in the gap. Within the literary form that we tag “mystery” you will read some of the finest fiction on the subject of the environment, the machinations of government, immigration, treatment of refugees, poverty, international conflict—and so many more subjects from writers who have done stellar homework or who are already experts in their field but have chosen fiction to touch upon universal truths rather than be restricted by hard-wired facts. Perhaps noted historian Simon Schama was onto something when he said in his series, The History of Now, “It’s not always politicians, but artists, musicians and writers who rouse us from indifference and become the true agents of change.” That works as long as we also remember that as novelists of whatever stripe, we are in the entertainment industry. Since I wrote Maisie Dobbs—which was published twenty years ago this year—I have noticed that more and more fiction crosses the boundaries of so called “genre” (a word I’m not fond of, especially when used by what I will call a literary snob)—but it seems so many in the publishing/book world haven’t quite grasped what has happened. Or perhaps it makes work that much harder if too many boxes have to be checked at a time when a significant number of books are hitting the publication list on a given date. I’ve read that Oprah will not read a mystery as mysteries do not meet her stringent literary standards. I wonder if that’s true, because I cannot imagine such narrow-mindedness in someone who promotes reading to a wide audience—and I don’t want to get into trouble on the grounds of quoting hearsay. Yet many booksellers are right there in this ever-changing game. As one bookseller told me, “In my estimation, they’re all novels, I don’t think of categories at all—I just want to find out whether something is worth recommending to my customers, based upon what I know they like and don’t like.” Fortunately, in the United States, the “Mystery” category is used more than “Crime” whereas the latter is true in the UK, which is limiting for authors and indeed readers. In one leading London bookstore, I discovered my novel, The Care and Management of Lies shelved under “Crime.” I pointed out that it was not crime, and not even a mystery, so it was in the wrong place. The bookseller asked where she should put it, and I said, “Well, general fiction, historical fiction, war fiction, literary fiction—maybe one copy in each.” There was a stunned silence before she said, “Sorry, I can only put it in one place, so I’d better leave it where it is.” So, if you’re ever interested in that book—a story of the Great War—you’re more likely to find it shelved in the Crime section, which explains why I received a few emails complaining that the novel was light on mystery! My latest novel, The White Lady isn’t a crime novel, though there is a little shop-lifting and dog-doping activity, plus there are a few nasty criminals in the story—and it is a thriller. More than anything, though, it is a war story and reflects what I feel in my heart about the plight of children caught in the crosshairs of war. But if war’s a crime—and I think it is—The White Lady is in exactly the right place if you’ve found it shelved under the Crime or Mystery banner. *** View the full article

Jessica Morgan and Heather Cocks, also known as The Fug Girls, have been blogging since 2004, and, like me, have seen a lot of changes in the business world online. We talk about how it seems like there’s yet another media contraction happening, and how that affects us, and about their new Substack, Drinks with Broads. But of course, we also talk about fashion, stylists, and current trends, too. If you’re still looking at pictures from the Oscars, this episode will be a treat. … Music: purple-planet.com Listen to the podcast → Read the transcript → Here are the books we discuss in this podcast: You can find Heather and Jessica every day at GoFugYourself.com, and on Twitter and Instagram @FugGirls. You can find out more about their newsletter and subscribe at Drinks WithBroads. We also mentioned: GFY: Kristen Stewart in Chanel at the Berlin Film Festival IG: ChanelFlopsAgain Grace Jones for Wolford The Normal Gossip Podcast Poker Face Russian Doll The Green Glove Gang (trailer on YT) Chicago Fire, Med, and PD The Americans and yes, there were Russian spies and they lived in Montclair NJ If you like the podcast, you can subscribe to our feed, or find us at iTunes. You can also find us on Stitcher, and Spotify, too. We also have a cool page for the podcast on iTunes. More ways to sponsor: Sponsor us through Patreon! (What is Patreon?) http://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/WP/wp-content/themes/smartbitches/images/podcast/patreon.png What did you think of today's episode? Got ideas? Suggestions? You can talk to us on the blog entries for the podcast or talk to us on Facebook if that's where you hang out online. You can email us at sbjpodcast@gmail.com or you can call and leave us a message at our Google voice number: 201-371-3272. Please don't forget to give us a name and where you're calling from so we can work your message into an upcoming podcast. Thanks for listening! Remember to subscribe to our podcast feed, find us on iTunes or on Stitcher. View the full article

Introduction to Pre-event Assignments The below seven assignments are vital to reaching an understanding of specific and critical core elements that go into the creation of a commercially viable genre novel or narrative non-fiction. Of course, there is more to it than this, as you will see, but here we have a good primer that assures we're literally all on the same page before the event begins. You may return here as many times as you need to edit your topic post (login and click "edit"). Pay special attention to antagonists, setting, conflict and core wound hooks. And btw, quiet novels do not sell. Keep that in mind and be aggressive with your work. Michael Neff Algonkian Conference Director ____________ After you've registered and logged in, create your reply to this topic (button top right). Please utilize only one reply for all of your responses so the forum topic will not become cluttered. Also, strongly suggest typing up your "reply" in a separate file then copying it over to your post before submitting. Not a good idea to lose what you've done! __________________________________________________________ THE ACT OF STORY STATEMENT Before you begin to consider or rewrite your story premise, you must develop a simple "story statement." In other words, what's the mission of your protagonist? The goal? What must be done? What must this person create? Save? Restore? Accomplish? Defeat?... Defy the dictator of the city and her bury brother’s body (ANTIGONE)? Struggle for control over the asylum (ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST)? Do whatever it takes to recover lost love (THE GREAT GATSBY)? Save the farm and live to tell the story (COLD MOUNTAIN)? Find the wizard and a way home to Kansas (WIZARD OF OZ)? Note that all of these are books with strong antagonists who drive the plot line (see also "Core Wounds and Conflict Lines" below). FIRST ASSIGNMENT: write your story statement. ___________________________________________________ THE ANTAGONIST PLOTS THE POINT (Photo : Javert from "Les Misérables") What are the odds of you having your manuscript published if the overall story and narrative fail to meet publisher demands for sufficient suspense, character concern, and conflict? Answer: none. You might therefore ask, what major factor makes for a quiet and dull manuscript brimming with insipid characters and a story that cascades from chapter to chapter with tens of thousands of words, all of them combining irresistibly to produce an audible thudding sound in the mind like a mallet hitting a side of cold beef? Answer: the unwillingness or inability of the writer to create a suitable antagonist who stirs and spices the plot hash. Let's make it clear what we're talking about. By "antagonist" we specifically refer to an actual fictional character, an embodiment of certain traits and motivations who plays a significant role in catalyzing and energizing plot line(s), or at bare minimum, in assisting to evolve the protagonist's character arc (and by default the story itself) by igniting complication(s) the protagonist, and possibly other characters, must face and solve (or fail to solve). CONTINUE READING ENTIRE ARTICLE AT NWOE THEN RETURN HERE. SECOND ASSIGNMENT: in 200 words or less, sketch the antagonist or antagonistic force in your story. Keep in mind their goals, their background, and the ways they react to the world about them. ___________________________________________________ CONJURING YOUR BREAKOUT TITLE What is your breakout title? How important is a great title before you even become published? Very important! Quite often, agents and editors will get a feel for a work and even sense the marketing potential just from a title. A title has the ability to attract and condition the reader's attention. It can be magical or thud like a bag of wet chalk, so choose carefully. A poor title sends the clear message that what comes after will also be of poor quality. Go to Amazon.Com and research a good share of titles in your genre, come up with options, write them down and let them simmer for at least 24 hours. Consider character or place names, settings, or a "label" that describes a major character, like THE ENGLISH PATIENT or THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST. Consider also images, objects, or metaphors in the novel that might help create a title, or perhaps a quotation from another source (poetry, the Bible, etc.) that thematically represents your story. Or how about a title that summarizes the whole story: THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES, HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS, THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP, etc. Keep in mind that the difference between a mediocre title and a great title is the difference between THE DEAD GIRL'S SKELETON and THE LOVELY BONES, between TIME TO LOVE THAT CHOLERA and LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA between STRANGERS FROM WITHIN (Golding's original title) and LORD OF THE FLIES, between BEING LIGHT AND UNBEARABLE and THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING. THIRD ASSIGNMENT: create a breakout title (list several options, not more than three, and revisit to edit as needed). ___________________________________________________ DECIDING YOUR GENRE AND APPROACHING COMPARABLES Did you know that a high percentage of new novel writers don't fully understand their genre, much less comprehend comparables? When informing professionals about the nuances of your novel, whether by query letter or oral pitch, you must know your genre first, and provide smart comparables second. In other words, you need to transcend just a simple statement of genre (literary, mystery, thriller, romance, science fiction, etc.) by identifying and relating your novel more specifically to each publisher's or agent's area of expertise, and you accomplish this by wisely comparing your novel to contemporary published novels they will most likely recognize and appreciate--and it usually doesn't take more than two good comps to make your point. Agents and publishing house editors always want to know the comps. There is more than one reason for this. First, it helps them understand your readership, and thus how to position your work for the market. Secondly, it demonstrates up front that you are a professional who understands your contemporary market, not just the classics. Very important! And finally, it serves as a tool to enable them to pitch your novel to the decision-makers in the business. Most likely you will need to research your comps. If you're not sure how to begin, go to Amazon.Com, type in the title of a novel you believe very similar to yours, choose it, then scroll down the page to see Amazon's list of "Readers Also Bought This" and begin your search that way. Keep in mind that before you begin, you should know enough about your own novel to make the comparison in the first place! By the way, beware of using comparables by overly popular and classic authors. If you compare your work to classic authors like H.G. Wells and Gabriel Marquez in the same breath you will risk being declared insane. If you compare your work to huge contemporary authors like Nick Hornby or Jodi Picoult or Nora Ephron or Dan Brown or J.K. Rowling, and so forth, you will not be laughed at, but you will also not be taken seriously since thousands of others compare their work to the same writers. Best to use two rising stars in your genre. If you can't do this, use only one classic or popular author and combine with a rising star. Choose carefully! FOURTH ASSIGNMENT: - Read this NWOE article on comparables then return here. - Develop two smart comparables for your novel. This is a good opportunity to immerse yourself in your chosen genre. Who compares to you? And why? ____________________________________________________ CORE WOUND AND THE PRIMARY CONFLICT Conflict, tension, complication, drama--all basically related, and all going a long way to keeping the reader's eyes fixated on your story. These days, serving up a big manuscript of quiet is a sure path to damnation. You need tension on the page at all times, and the best way to accomplish this is to create conflict and complications in the plot and narrative. Consider "conflict" divided into three parts, all of which you MUST have present in the novel. First part, the primary dramatic conflict which drives through the work from beginning to end, from first major plot point to final reversal, and finally resolving with an important climax. Next, secondary conflicts or complications that take various social forms - anything from a vigorous love subplot to family issues to turmoil with fellow characters. Finally, those various inner conflicts and core wounds all important characters must endure and resolve as the story moves forward. But now, back to the PRIMARY DRAMATIC CONFLICT. If you've taken care to consider your story description and your hook line, you should be able to identify your main conflict(s). Let's look at some basic information regarding the history of conflict in storytelling. Conflict was first described in ancient Greek literature as the agon, or central contest in tragedy. According to Aristotle, in order to hold the interest, the hero must have a single conflict. The agon, or act of conflict, involves the protagonist (the "first fighter" or "hero") and the antagonist corresponding to the villain (whatever form that takes). The outcome of the contest cannot be known in advance, and, according to later drama critics such as Plutarch, the hero's struggle should be ennobling. Is that always true these days? Not always, but let's move on. Even in contemporary, non-dramatic literature, critics have observed that the agon is the central unit of the plot. The easier it is for the protagonist to triumph, the less value there is in the drama. In internal and external conflict alike, the antagonist must act upon the protagonist and must seem at first to overmatch him or her. The above defines classic drama that creates conflict with real stakes. You see it everywhere, to one degree or another, from classic contemporary westerns like THE SAVAGE BREED to a time-tested novel as literary as THE GREAT GATSBY. And of course, you need to have conflict or complications in nonfiction also, in some form, or you have a story that is too quiet. For examples let's return to the story descriptions and create some HOOK LINES. Let's don't forget to consider the "core wound" of the protagonist. Please read this article at NWOE then return here. The Hand of Fatima by Ildefonso Falcones A young Moor torn between Islam and Christianity, scorned and tormented by both, struggles to bridge the two faiths by seeking common ground in the very nature of God. Summer's Sisters by Judy Blume After sharing a magical summer with a friend, a young woman must confront her friend's betrayal of her with the man she loved. The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud As an apprentice mage seeks revenge on an elder magician who humiliated him, he unleashes a powerful Djinn who joins the mage to confront a danger that threatens their entire world. Note that it is fairly easy to ascertain the stakes in each case above: a young woman's love and friendship, the entire world, and harmony between opposed religions. If you cannot make the stakes clear, the odds are you don't have any. Also, is the core wound obvious or implied? FIFTH ASSIGNMENT: write your own hook line (logline) with conflict and core wound following the format above. Though you may not have one now, keep in mind this is a great developmental tool. In other words, you best begin focusing on this if you're serious about commercial publication. ______________________________________________________ OTHER MATTERS OF CONFLICT: TWO MORE LEVELS As noted above, consider "conflict" divided into three parts, all of which you should ideally have present. First, the primary conflict which drives through the core of the work from beginning to end and which zeniths with an important climax (falling action and denouement to follow). Next, secondary conflicts or complications which can take various social forms (anything from a vigorous love subplot to family issues to turmoil with fellow characters). Finally, those inner conflicts the major characters must endure and resolve. You must note the inner personal conflicts elsewhere in this profile, but make certain to note any important interpersonal conflicts within this particular category." SIXTH ASSIGNMENT: sketch out the conditions for the inner conflict your protagonist will have. Why will they feel in turmoil? Conflicted? Anxious? Sketch out one hypothetical scenario in the story wherein this would be the case--consider the trigger and the reaction. Next, likewise sketch a hypothetical scenario for the "secondary conflict" involving the social environment. Will this involve family? Friends? Associates? What is the nature of it? ______________________________________________________ THE INCREDIBLE IMPORTANCE OF SETTING When considering your novel, whether taking place in a contemporary urban world or on a distant magical planet in Andromeda, you must first sketch the best overall setting and sub-settings for your story. Consider: the more unique and intriguing (or quirky) your setting, the more easily you're able to create energetic scenes, narrative, and overall story. A great setting maximizes opportunities for interesting characters, circumstances, and complications, and therefore makes your writing life so much easier. Imagination is truly your best friend when it comes to writing competitive fiction, and nothing provides a stronger foundation than a great setting. One of the best selling contemporary novels, THE HUNGER GAMES, is driven by the circumstances of the setting, and the characters are a product of that unique environment, the plot also. But even if you're not writing SF/F, the choice of setting is just as important, perhaps even more so. If you must place your upmarket story in a sleepy little town in Maine winter, then choose a setting within that town that maximizes opportunities for verve and conflict, for example, a bed and breakfast stocked to the ceiling with odd characters who combine to create comical, suspenseful, dangerous or difficult complications or subplot reversals that the bewildered and sympathetic protagonist must endure and resolve while he or she is perhaps engaged in a bigger plot line: restarting an old love affair, reuniting with a family member, starting a new business, etc. And don't forget that non-gratuitous sex goes a long way, especially for American readers. CONTINUE TO READ THIS ARTICLE THEN RETURN. FINAL ASSIGNMENT: sketch out your setting in detail. What makes it interesting enough, scene by scene, to allow for uniqueness and cinema in your narrative and story? Please don't simply repeat what you already have which may well be too quiet. You can change it. That's why you're here! Start now. Imagination is your best friend, and be aggressive with it. ________________________ Below are several links to part of an article or whole articles that we feel are the most valuable for memoir writers. We have reviewed these and agree 110%. MEMOIR WRITING - CHOOSE A SPECIFIC EVENT (good general primer) How to Write a Memoir That People Care About | NY Book Editors NYBOOKEDITORS.COM Are you thinking of writing a memoir but you're stuck? We've got the remedy. Check out our beginner's guide on writing an epic and engaging memoir. MEMOIR MUST INCLUDE TRANSCENDENCE Writing Memoir? Include Transcendence - Memoir coach and author Marion Roach MARIONROACH.COM MEMOIR REQUIRES TRANSCENDENCE. Something has to happen. Or shift. Someone has to change a little. Or grow. It’s the bare hack minimum of memoir. WRITE IT LIKE A NOVEL How to Write a Powerful Memoir in 5 Simple Steps JERRYJENKINS.COM When it comes to writing a memoir, there are 5 things you need to focus on. If you do, your powerful story will have the best chance of impacting others. MEMOIR ANECDOTES - HOW TO MAKE THEM SHINE How to Write an Anecdote That Makes Your Nonfiction Come Alive JERRYJENKINS.COM Knowing how to write an anecdote lets you utilize the power of story with your nonfiction and engage your reader from the first page. ________________________

New York Write to Pitch is the only conference any serious writer should attend. Michael and his team expertly guided us into the world of fiction, while helping us understand the industry so we know what is selling and not selling and what is a high concept idea versus a middle concept (and why they matter). I couldn’t have asked for a kinder group of passionate writers to learn and laugh alongside each other. The NYC Pitch team was professional and honest in their feedback, and the opportunity to pitch to editors in person was invaluable. I highly recommend this conference to any serious writer. Thank you, New York Pitch!

Courtesy of Thomas Demand and MACK. The Review has long been a fan of Thomas Demand’s work; our Spring 2015 issue featured a portfolio of his paper sculptures of cherry blossoms. His series The Dailies recreates quotidian objects and images: a coffee cup, a tray of cigarette butts. Only tiny flaws (pencil markings, tape) reveal them as constructions; otherwise his compositions are stripped of everything but their form. But paper isn’t just a blank canvas; it also carries meaning, even if these associations are subtle: it’s the medium of office workers, receipts, menus, greeting cards, origami, newspapers—and, of course, of The Paris Review. To accompany a selection of images from The Dailies, we talked to Demand about paper, literature, and the home. INTERVIEWER What does paper mean in your work? THOMAS DEMAND Paper is a formidable, malleable material that everyone touches on a daily basis. We all share this experience—we know its haptic and aesthetic possibilities more than perhaps anything else. We mostly use paper for temporary purposes—napkins, newspaper, coffee cups, the Amazon box, and so on. We make notes on it and throw it away, wrap our gifts in it and rip it to receive them. I find that important to consider, if I look at the more commonplace iconography in my work, like in The Dailies. I’m also interested in paper’s relations to information, model-making, and geometry. INTERVIEWER Paper has been disappearing from the real spaces you photograph for quite some time, being replaced by screens, stickers of QR codes, audio recordings. Do you have a sentimental attachment to paper? DEMAND I don’t think it has disappeared, actually—think of any sustainable recycled packaging effort, like Amazon’s. The production of paper has increased monumentally. But it might become a more valued material, which is good. People used to drink the worst piss called “coffee”—now it’s a drink prepared by baristas with butterflies in the milk topping. Am I sentimental about the old bitter filter coffee? No. Note, however, that that coffee was made through a paper filter, to be consumed in paper cups. As far as we know, the paper cup was first made by Chinese craftsmen around two thousand years ago. In all its forms, paper has accompanied our civilizations, enabling us not only to drink but to write, to remember. I don’t see this as a metaphorical value but as one which enables the production of other values. INTERVIEWER If The Dailies were the work of a particular writer, who would it be? DEMAND When it comes to The Dailies, I think of writers who don’t use an overarching narrative—Walter Benjamin, Alexander Kluge, Hans Blumenberg, Botho Strauss. INTERVIEWER What do your home and your workspace look like? Do you make frequent “Home Improvements”? DEMAND I need to wake up in an environment that is as empty as possible, and I like to live in a sparsely furnished place. I am not afraid of an empty room. I also try to part from things I haven’t needed nor missed for two or three years (apart from art, which mostly is from friends). However, I enjoy when the work spills over the tables I work from and the leftovers of my makings are scattered around the actual piece. But I need to return to a clean space to approach my next work. I hardly ever work on more than one project at once. Courtesy of Thomas Demand and MACK. Courtesy of Thomas Demand and MACK. Courtesy of Thomas Demand and MACK. Courtesy of Thomas Demand and MACK. Thomas Demand is a German photographer and sculptor who lives in Los Angeles. His new, expanded edition of The Dailies is out now from MACK. View the full article

The Vibrant Years The Vibrant Years by Sonali Dev is $2.99! This is more women’s fiction than romance, I believe. It’s also published by Mindy Kaling’s imprint with Amazon, so I believe it’s Amazon only for the ebook. Living on their own terms means being there for one another. When sixty-five-year-old Bindu Desai inherits a million dollars, she’s astounded―and horrified. The windfall threatens to expose a shameful mistake from her youth. On an impulse, Bindu quickly spends it on something unexpected: a condo in a posh retirement community in Florida. The impulsive decision blindsides Bindu’s daughter-in-law, Aly. At forty-seven, Aly still shares a home with Bindu even after her divorce from Bindu’s son. But maybe this change is just the push Aly needs to fight for her own dreams. As Bindu and Aly navigate their new dynamic, Aly’s daughter, Cullie, is faced with losing the business that made her a tech-world star. The only way to save it is to deliver a new idea to her investors―and they want the dating app she pitched them in a panic. Problem is, Cullie has never been on a real date. Naturally, enlisting her single mother and grandmother to help her with the research is the answer. From USA Today bestselling author Sonali Dev comes a heartfelt novel about three generations of hilarious, unconventional, ambitious women who embark on a shared journey of self-discovery. Join the Desai women as they come together to embrace the hijinks and heartbreak of facing their greatest fears to finally live their most vibrant lives. Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. Hired Hired by Zoey Castile is $2.99! This is the second book in the Happy Endings series and book one is also on sale. I actually think it might be my favorite book in the trilogy, as both the hero and heroine just genuinely love being around one another. My biggest complaint was that I felt the heroine’s relationship with her mother could have used more of a resolution. For a man who makes his living pleasuring women, what happens when the only pay-out worth having is love? Faith Abigail Charles has always done the right thing. So when her mother runs for mayor of New Orleans, Faith puts her law career on hold to help her win. But when tensions run high, Faith trades one kind of heat for another—in the arms of a hard-bodied stranger. He’s everything a woman dreams of in a lover. So much so that her one-night stand turns into two, then three, then four . . . For Aiden Rios, meeting smart, sexy Faith feels like fate. After being ditched by his client in the Big Easy, the high-paid male escort needs a little company himself. Aiden knows he’ll have to come clean about his line of work, and he plans to—right after another taste of Faith’s sweetness—and another and another. . . . Until a chance meeting with his client leaves Aiden exposed—and Faith shocked and hurt. Now the hired hottie must show Faith that the love they share is bigger than the scandal threatening to destroy them . . . Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. A Dangerous Kind of Lady A Dangerous Kind of Lady by Mia Vincy is 99c! This is book one in the Longhope Abbey series. Vincy’s books have been positively mentioned in the comments before. Do you have a favorite? A desperate situation calls for dangerous deeds… Proud heiress Arabella Larke has little respect for rules and no time for scruples, not when she faces marriage to a man she loathes and fears. Determined to save herself, Arabella comes up with a plan: a fake engagement with her childhood nemesis, Guy Roth, Marquess of Hardbury, recently returned home after years away. To Arabella’s surprise, Guy has become strong, honorable, and unexpectedly attractive…but he refuses to even hear her plan. After leaving England to escape his corrupt, controlling father, Guy has vowed never to do anyone’s bidding again—certainly not Arabella’s. To Guy’s surprise, Arabella has become intriguing, quick-witted, and unexpectedly attractive, but he has enough drama trying to gain custody of his younger sisters, and he wants nothing to do with her dubious schemes. Until Arabella shows up at his house one night, and Guy finds himself entangled to a dangerous degree… Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. Vengeance Born Vengeance Born by Kylie Griffin is $2.99! Ellen read this one and gave it a C+: I thought Annika was a compelling heroine and it was my investment in her journey that kept me reading, plus a desire to further explore the intriguing (if at times frustrating) world-building. However, the actual romance was meh and there were a few things I found weird, unsettling, or otherwise not to my tastes. There is no mercy in the demon realm. No escape. In this place of desperation and conflict, anyone who is not pure bred is virtually powerless. Until an unlikely champion is born… Annika, half-blood daughter of the Na’Reish King, longs for more than her tormented life among her father’s people. Conceived in hatred and bred as a tool of retribution, she’s gifted with a special talent that can heal as well as destroy… With the Na’Reish vastly outnumbering them, Kalan, a Light Blade warrior, knows the future of humankind depends on him alone. Incursions into human territory and raids for blood-slaves by the Na’Reish Horde have increased. As Chosen-leader, he faces the task of stopping the demons-and convincing the Council of aging Light Blade warriors that change is necessary for survival. When Annika learns Kalan is a prisoner in her father’s dungeon, her dream of escape seems within reach. She agrees to free him in exchange for his protection once they reach human territory. Now, marked for death for helping him, Annika must learn to trust Kalan as they face not only the perilous journey to the border but enemies within the Council-and discover a shocking truth that could throw the human race into civil war… Add to Goodreads To-Read List → You can find ordering info for this book here. View the full article

Photograph by Gary Bridgman. courtesy of wikimedia commons, licensed under CCO 2.5. “That’s the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long,” William Faulkner wrote of his native Mississippi in his novel As I Lay Dying. “Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.” There came a day when, as a reader of Faulkner, I wanted to see what he was talking about. If the tendency of things in Mississippi was to hang on too long, as Faulkner claimed, maybe the populace and the landscape would be more or less the same as they’d been when he wrote those lines in 1930. The drive from Brooklyn to his house, Rowan Oak, in Oxford, Mississippi, was seventeen hours. Five hours in, I made a pit stop at an abolitionist holy site: the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. John Brown’s raid on the armory, in October 1859, was one of the proximate causes of the Civil War. It enraged a plantation-owning class already frightened of northern agitators. “I want to free all the negroes in this state,” he said, referring to Virginia, where half a million people were enslaved. His plan was to seize guns and hand them out to men in the nearby fields, fomenting rebellion. With twenty-one followers, he stormed the armory and held parts of it for two days before U.S. marines flushed him out. All that’s left of the armory, mostly destroyed in the subsequent war, is the fire-engine house, which happened to be Brown’s final redoubt. He was captured there, and then taken to prison, tried, and hanged. I stood in the house; it’s the size of a two-car garage, dwarfed by the green, misty mountains that surround it. It drove home how tiny Brown’s force was, for it to have been able to fit inside such a small place—how inadequate to his stated task. In Faulkner’s novella “The Bear,” John Brown appears without warning, in the middle of a stream of consciousness, and has a dialogue with God. He explains to Him that he, Brown, is unusual among men only in that he sees slavery for what it is, a “nightmare.” God asks, “Where are your Minutes, your Motions, your Parliamentary Procedures?” Brown responds, “I ain’t against them. They are all right I reckon for them that have the time.” Note that Faulkner makes God sound lame and officious, and gives Brown, an Ohioan, the locutions of a backwoods Mississippian. As a man of action, and as a person who acknowledges the true nature of things, Brown is a kind of honorary Southerner. Faulkner called Lafayette County, his home, “the final blue and dying echo of the Appalachian mountains.” This is true. I followed the spine of the alpine chain southwest from the peaks of Harpers Ferry, where the weather was cool and pleasant, down through Tennessee, until the mountains dribbled away in the heat of northern Mississippi. Lafayette County was the last place where the hills were substantial. I drove an additional hour west to see the Delta, which was flat, consistent with its reputation. Then I turned around and drove to Oxford. Rowan Oak, where Faulkner lived from the age of thirty-two until his death at sixty-five, stands just outside of downtown Oxford, but it’s surrounded by woods, invisible from the road. From the dirt parking lot, you walk through a hardwood forest of virgin timber until a clearing opens before you and you are in a secluded “postage stamp” world, to use Faulkner’s term, several acres of grass and gardens walled in on all sides by dense foliage. There is a long, broad footpath lined with fragrant red cedars, planted in the 1870s because they were thought to combat yellow fever. The footpath leads to a big white house. Most of Oxford looks like any American college town, block after block of modest Colonials on their little green lots. But at Rowan Oak, the manorial landscape perseveres. The two-story clapboard house was built in 1844 by William Turner, the same Oxonian who built the nearby mansion that inspired “the Compson place,” the setting of The Sound and the Fury. Rowan Oak is not as grand as the Compson place, let alone the cotton-kingdom palaces in the environs of Natchez and Charleston. It looks like a crude drawing of a Greek Revival house; four Doric columns support an unadorned pediment. It’s plainer than Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst, and about the same size. But Dickinson’s house faces the street and is visible to its neighbors, despite the poet’s famous reclusiveness. Rowan Oak, by contrast, is hidden from the surrounding village, set apart; it takes a bit of effort to get to or away from it. You’d think that Faulkner, famous for writing interlocking stories about a community where everybody was in everybody’s business (his invented Yoknapatawpha County) would have lived in a house situated as Dickinson’s was, on a thoroughfare, in the thick of things, and that Dickinson would have lived in a place like Rowan Oak. Circling the house counter-clockwise, I saw the wooden smokehouse Faulkner erected on the ruins of the quarters for enslaved people, the post oak barn he built for his cow, and the stable he built for his horses. He loved riding; he joined two foxhunting clubs while Writer-in-Residence at the University of Virginia, and a fall from horseback at Rowan Oak was a factor in his early death, because the pain from the injury made it harder for him to stay sober. On the right side of the house, there was the portico, where, standing in the shade one evening, Faulkner’s wife, Estelle, gave him the title for one of his novels, remarking that there was something unusual about the quality of light in August. She later threw the one extant manuscript of Light in August out the window of a moving car, forcing her adulterous, dipsomaniacal husband to pull over and gather the pages. It was August when I was there, and I thought I saw what Estelle meant: the humidity was so intense that the sunbeams looked sticky, honeyed. But it was cool and dim in the foyer, where a graduate student stationed in an armchair collected my seven-dollar fee. There was nobody else around, so he showed me the library in the front of the house, where Faulkner had written Light in August and Absalom, Absalom!. There were handsome bookshelves Faulkner had built himself, with special compartments for his shotgun shells. Naive art hung framed on the walls. This was the work of Faulkner’s mother, Maud. There was one portrait of Faulkner, and one of Maud’s grandfather in his Confederate uniform, both men wearing the same sad, gentle expression. I walked down the hall to the back study, where Faulkner wrote his late novels. The plot for A Fable was outlined in pencil and ink across two of the walls. There was something deeply Faulknerian about this: a screenwriter’s preoccupation with plot coupled with a modernist’s urge to transgress. Write a detailed outline, sure, but on the wall, like a convict scrawling on the wall of his cell. I couldn’t proceed upstairs, to the Faulkners’ separate bedrooms, without hearing my professor, the great Southern writer Allan Gurganus, one of very few novelists who might with justice be named Faulkner’s successor, describe those bedrooms in his mellow drawl to a rapt classroom. “It was a house divided between two drinkers who despised each other. He drank whiskey, she drank wine. And let me tell you, boys and girls …” Here, Allan leaned forward and paused to look each one of us in the eye. “You can still taste the poison in the air.” The only evidence of discord in the Faulkners’ bedrooms was the window AC unit in Estelle’s, installed the day after William’s funeral, because he hated air-conditioning so much he wouldn’t let her install it while he was alive. I didn’t know to what degree my feeling of immersion in an unwholesome miasma was Allan’s influence, and to what degree it was the persistence of marital toxins in the atmosphere, but I wanted to get outdoors. I walked down the hall onto the balcony, and it started to rain, first a patter, then a downpour. It released the smell of the curative cedars. I went downstairs and out into the rain, and when the rain stopped, steam rose from the grass and the circular garden, from the scuppernong arbor and the knot of wisteria. This was a beautiful place. But when Faulkner and his family moved in, it was rustic in the extreme. The house was lit by oil lamps and heated by a cast-iron stove in the kitchen. His stepdaughter, Cho-Cho, recalled that it was “tumbled down, surrounded by brush, outdoor privy, snakes, no electricity, plumbing.” But Faulkner was an avid do-it-yourselfer (see Geoff Dyer’s study of D. H. Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage, for more on modernist writers and the home improvement impulse). He added amenities throughout the thirties and forties, funding his projects with his work on Hollywood screenplays, like The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not. During Faulkner’s lifetime, nobody knew whether Rowan Oak was a place where people had been enslaved. It was well-documented that Robert Sheegog, the house’s original owner, had enslaved many people, but Sheegog owned multiple properties, and this one was not a labor camp out in the country but a home built for leisure, close to town. The past at Rowan Oak was both present and befogged in Faulkner’s day, a subject of speculation, like Joe Christmas’s parentage in Light in August or Charles Bon’s in Absalom, Absalom!. After I’d wandered the grounds, I spent the weekend in Oxford, a heady experience for a Northern fetishist of things Southern. I ate catfish and grits, drank whiskey in a bar on the outskirts of town where old men in hats played guitars. I visited Faulkner’s grave and his birthplace, drove around the Mississippi hill country, and ate okra with congenial strangers. I tried to understand why I felt drawn to this part of the world. To that end, I drank whiskey in a second bar, this one downtown, overlooking the statue of the Confederate soldier who gazed “with empty eyes,” in Faulkner’s phrase, at the square. I decided the reason was this. I grew up in Amherst, a mile down the road from Dickinson’s house, and Massachusetts is the Mississippi of the North, Mississippi the Massachusetts of the South. They’re on opposite sides of the American political spectrum, but they’re both places where the present is dwarfed and chastened by the past. In Massachusetts, a given location is known as the spot where the minutemen faced the redcoats on the green, or where Jonathan Edwards delivered his sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” or where the Mayflower landed, or where the whalers set sail, or where the tea was dumped in the harbor. In Mississippi, it’s the same: here’s where Grant’s army bivouacked; here’s where the formerly enslaved Union soldiers drove the Texans from the field; here’s where Elvis grew up; here’s where Emmett Till was murdered; here’s where the earliest blues music was performed. I’ve heard both Massachusetts and Mississippi maligned as boring, and I’ve tried to explain to the maligners: You need to stop living so much in the present. Faulkner is, of course, the guy who said, “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.” Rowan Oak preserves the physical evidence of his compulsion to live in a house that summoned bygone times, a need shared by the Compsons in The Sound and the Fury, Joanna Burden in Light in August, and Henry Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom!. You can see the agrarian outbuildings he rebuilt, the air conditioner he forbade (truly astounding), his riding boots, and the encircling woods that make the hum of traffic disappear. Benjamin Nugent is the author of Fraternity: Stories, and the recipient of The Paris Review’s 2019 Terry Southern Prize. View the full article

We have a proposition for you. You’ve heard it before that 1971 is the best year that crime movies have ever had. The French Connection, Shaft, Dirty Harry, A Clockwork Orange, Diamonds Are Forever, Get Carter, Klute. Even the non-crime movies are amazing: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, The Last Picture Show, McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Maybe you’ve heard it floated 1972 is the best year for crime movies. The Godfather, Deliverance, The Hot Rock, Superfly. Not as many crime masterpieces as the previous year, but a contender for its saga of the Corleone crime family. And you’ve definitely heard it argued that 1974 is actually the best year for crime movies. The Godfather Part II, Chinatown, Murder on the Orient Express, The Conversation, the Taking of Pelham 123, Sugarland Express. But we, the theoreticians at the genre salon known as CrimeReads, submit that 1973 is actually the greatest year crime movies ever had. Yes, it’s the year without a Coppola film. BUT! Get a load of this lineup. The Long Goodbye, The Sting, Serpico, Mean Streets, Paper Moon, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Badlands, Dillinger, The Last of Sheila, Papillon, The Outfit, Scarecrow, Live and Let Die. Plus, of course, 1973 saw masterpieces in horror and sci-fi: Don’t Look Now, Soylent Green, and The Exorcist. That’s a wallop of a roster, folks. And so today, a day in a year that happens to be half a century after 1973, we invite you to reflect on these movies with us. Yes, that’s right, today, our whole website is devoted to the crime films of 1973. The crime films of 1973 might represent a return to more personal crime stories. Not to essentialize too much, but while movies in 71, 72, and 74 focus on large-scale organizations, untamable circuits (families) of crime and corruption, 1973’s movies tend to take collective pause, a focus on the lives of their scrappy everyman (or everygirl, in the case of Addie Loggins) protagonists. There’s something very mortal, very humanistic about 1973’s crime movies. I won’t say they are the grittiest crime movies of them all (nothing is grittier than The French Connection), but there’s something… fragile, something local about them. These are movies about people. These movies are even about kids. These are movies about being nervously undercover, feeling alone and looking for a friend, not having much and wishing for the world. These are movies about living day to day and being exhausted with life. They are movies about people who have had enough and are desperate to change their paths. They are movies about feeling like, at any moment, the whole world might turn against you. These themes are very important to the development of the medium! Where would crime cinema be without the lonely, the friendless, the family-less, the alienated, the isolated, the small-timers, the ordinary people who take matters into their own hands, the unlikely undercover operatives, the rumpled and casual (and possibly stoned) PIs? Nowhere! Nowhere! So anyway, whether or not you agree, come and travel to Illinois and team up with Johnny Hooker and Henry Gondorff in George Roy Hill’s legendary film about an impossible confidence game. Or head to Los Angeles and tag along with Elliott Gould’s rumpled Marlowe. Board a yacht with with a group of old friends only to discover that you’re not friends at all. Or join in with a gang of ragtag grifters and pull off a scam. If this roundup proves nothing else, it’s that the 70s were the greatest decade of crime movies. And if you don’t agree with us about which individual year was the best, you have to agree with us about the whole thing. View the full article